Your body clears alcohol at a fixed rate of roughly one standard drink per hour, and nothing speeds that up. So the most important thing to do after getting drunk is support your body while it does the slow work of processing what you consumed. That means hydrating, eating, resting, and avoiding a few common mistakes that can make you feel worse or put your health at risk.
Drink Water, but Think Beyond Water
Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning it increases urine output well beyond what you’d normally produce from the same volume of fluid. This pulls water out of your body and disrupts your electrolyte balance. The key minerals affected include sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. That electrolyte disruption is a major reason you feel so rough the next day: the headache, dizziness, and fatigue aren’t just from dehydration itself but from the chemical imbalance that comes with it.
Plain water helps, but it doesn’t replace what you’ve lost. A sports drink, coconut water, or an oral rehydration solution will restore electrolytes faster. If you don’t have any of those, adding a pinch of salt to water and eating a banana (for potassium) covers the basics. Sip steadily rather than chugging a full bottle at once, especially if your stomach is uneasy.
Eat Something Starchy
Alcohol depletes your liver’s glycogen stores, which are your body’s primary short-term energy reserve. Research in mice has shown that alcohol consumption can reduce liver glycogen levels by more than 50%, and both acute and chronic drinking have this effect. When those stores drop, your blood sugar drops with them, contributing to shakiness, weakness, irritability, and brain fog.
Starchy, easy-to-digest foods like toast, rice, oatmeal, or crackers help replenish those glycogen stores and stabilize your blood sugar. If you can tolerate something more substantial, eggs or a simple meal with both carbohydrates and protein is even better. Greasy “hangover food” is popular but can irritate an already sensitive stomach. Start bland and work your way up.
Why You Feel Terrible Even After Sleeping
Alcohol wrecks your sleep quality even when it seems to knock you out. In the first half of the night, alcohol increases deep sleep but suppresses REM sleep, the phase tied to memory consolidation and mental restoration. In the second half, the pattern flips: deep sleep drops off and you wake up more frequently. Studies show that people who drink before bed spend significantly more time awake during the later hours of the night and don’t get the REM rebound their brain needs to compensate for what it missed earlier.
This is why you can sleep for eight or nine hours after drinking and still wake up feeling exhausted. Your brain never completed its normal sleep cycles. A nap the following day can help, but the real recovery comes from getting a full, uninterrupted night of sober sleep as soon as possible.
What Not to Take for a Headache
Reaching for a painkiller is instinctive, but your choice matters. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is processed by the liver, the same organ that’s already working overtime to clear alcohol from your system. Combining the two increases the risk of liver damage. Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) carries its own risks: research has found it can amplify alcohol’s toxic effects on the liver by increasing oxidative stress.
If you need pain relief, ibuprofen is generally considered the lesser risk of the two for occasional use, but take it with food to protect your stomach lining, which alcohol has already irritated. The safest option is simply waiting it out with water and rest.
Coffee Won’t Sober You Up
Caffeine makes you feel more alert, but it does not change your blood alcohol level or speed up metabolism. Your liver processes alcohol at its own fixed pace, about 7 grams per hour for an average-sized person, regardless of what else you consume. Studies have confirmed that combining caffeine with alcohol reduces the subjective feeling of drunkenness while doing nothing to improve actual motor coordination or reaction time. In other words, coffee makes you a wide-awake drunk person, not a sober one.
The morning after, coffee is fine in moderation and may help with the grogginess. Just be aware that it’s also a mild diuretic, so balance each cup with extra water.
“Hair of the Dog” Just Delays the Inevitable
Hangover symptoms peak when your blood alcohol level drops to zero. Drinking more alcohol the next morning temporarily raises that level again, which masks the symptoms. But as Laura Veach, a researcher at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has put it: “It doesn’t cure the hangover; it just sort of tricks you by masking the symptoms. They’re going to show up eventually.” You’re simply postponing the crash and adding more alcohol for your liver to process. There is no scientific evidence that this approach helps recovery.
Skip the Hard Workout
You’re already dehydrated, your electrolytes are off, your blood sugar is low, and your sleep was fragmented. Intense exercise on top of all that increases your risk of injury, muscle cramps, and heat-related illness. Your heart is also working harder than usual as your body manages the aftereffects of alcohol. A gentle walk or light stretching is fine and may even help you feel better, but save the heavy lifting or long run for the next day.
Know When It’s More Than a Hangover
Most hangovers are miserable but not dangerous. Alcohol poisoning is. The difference matters because the symptoms can overlap in the early stages. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the warning signs of alcohol overdose include:
- Mental confusion or stupor beyond normal drunkenness
- Vomiting while unconscious or semi-conscious
- Seizures
- Slow or irregular breathing (fewer than 8 breaths per minute, or gaps of 10+ seconds between breaths)
- Extremely low body temperature, pale or bluish skin
- No gag reflex, which means a person could choke on their own vomit
If someone shows any of these signs, they need emergency medical attention. A person who has passed out from drinking should be placed on their side (the recovery position) to prevent choking and monitored until help arrives. Blood alcohol can continue rising even after someone stops drinking, so “sleeping it off” can be genuinely dangerous when these symptoms are present.
A Realistic Recovery Timeline
At one drink per hour of processing time, a night of heavy drinking can take well over half a day to fully clear. If you had eight drinks, your body needs roughly eight hours just to metabolize the alcohol, starting from when you stopped drinking. Hangover symptoms typically peak somewhere in that window and can linger for up to 24 hours afterward.
There’s no hack that compresses this timeline. The most effective recovery plan is boring: water with electrolytes, simple food, rest, time. Most people feel substantially better by the evening after a rough night, and fully normal after one good night of sober sleep.